


Accidental Innuendo

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Also: profanity, Awkward Conversations, Because teenagers swear a lot, Early in Canon, Fictober, Fictober 2018, Gen, It's a fact of life like death and taxes, Was originally rated G but had to be made T for... reasons, set in early season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 12:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16367933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Ezra accidentally oversteps, learns some things. [Written for Fictober 2018]





	Accidental Innuendo

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, “Do we really have to do this again?”
> 
> Okay, I like Ezra. I really do. I recognize that making this my first fic with him in it, my first fic from his POV, was not the best way to express my affection, but this is a prompt fic and I’ve always wondered what happened to make him realize he needed to stop hitting on Sabine. Because I feel like he didn’t just stop on his own.

Sabine really wondered about Ezra, sometimes. The newest addition to the family had quickly carved out a niche for himself as the obnoxious little brother—though the obnoxiousness could be forgotten after an eye roll and a sigh given the way nothing felt quite whole without him around; funny how quickly he’d become essential to Sabine’s vision of what life on the _Ghost_ was supposed to be like. (But then, when families were as they were supposed to be, families were like that. You don’t feel the naturalness of their being together quite so much as you feel the unnaturalness of being apart.)

He was definitely a part of the family, now, but… Yeah. He was _definitely_ the obnoxious little brother. The obnoxious little brother who couldn’t get it through his head that one) their function in the family was siblings, and two) she was _not_ interested in him.

Yeah. Fun times.

To be absolutely fair, he didn’t try to hit on her every time they spoke. Ezra was a bit… _Ezra_ , and didn’t always seem to know what the limits were, but he never really graduated to what Sabine would call _pushy_ , skittering away after she got to the point of glaring at him. She’d never felt threatened, just annoyed. And that annoyance was mounting to something closer to anger more quickly the more this went on.

-0-0-0-

Ezra Bridger knew none of this. Well, he knew Sabine got a little annoyed with his flirting, but he thought he was making progress. Maybe. It was hard to tell. He wasn’t a mind-reader, after all, and Kanan told him that no matter how far his Jedi training went, the chances of his actually being able to read minds was pretty much nil. What the uninitiated thought of as mind-reading, Kanan told him, was really just being able to pick up on emotions and sensations and guessing at someone’s general train of thought. Which sounded a lot more boring than mind-reading, to be honest, but a lot of things tended to be a _lot_ more boring than advertised. Ezra didn’t like it, but he hadn’t liked being homeless, either, and his dislike hadn’t changed the fact that he was, in fact, camping out in an abandoned communications tower instead of living in an actual house with—

Anyways, he thought he was making progress with Sabine. Not enough progress that she’d actually call him by his name instead of just calling him “kid,” but every little bit helped. Where this progress was supposed to be leading, well, Ezra hadn’t thought that far ahead. The only objective right now was to get her flirting back.

And now, with Kanan and Zeb not onboard to roll their eyes or laugh at a failed attempt, and with Hera doing some routine maintenance in the _Phantom_ (and thus also not on hand to roll her eyes or laugh if he managed nothing more impressive than another pratfall), was the perfect time to try again.

Sabine was sitting in the open doorway into her cabin, and Ezra thought he might have been drawn here even if she wasn’t like-a-bolt-from-the-blue grade amazing. Even from the doorway, Sabine’s cabin was an explosion of color, the most vibrant part of the _Ghost_ by far. Heck, Sabine’s cabin was probably the most vibrant thing on all of Lothal. Ezra had lived on Lothal his whole life, and for all its flaws he did love it, loved it in the tired, slightly exasperated way only a local could love it, but there was no denying that Lothal was kinda lacking in color. Every bit of the planet that Ezra had ever seen was cast in dusty brown and a green that wasn’t parched enough to be yellow, but certainly wasn’t vibrant enough to really _deserve_ the name ‘green’, in dull, muted blues and ashen grays. Even the sea, which everyone agreed was supposed to be some sort of sparkling, shimmering thing, just looked… dull. And the sky over Capital City was perpetually overcast with a faint sheen of sickly-yellowish smog, so that didn’t help.

(It occurred to Ezra that he hadn’t started thinking about colors like this until he met Sabine. Before he met Sabine, he couldn’t have cared less about colors. And he didn’t even think it had that much to do with the crush, either. It just… It just felt like a natural consequence of living on the same ship as her. Ezra didn’t know how else to describe it.)

But there was Sabine, sitting in the open doorway into her cabin, poring over a sketchbook with the ends of her dyed hair partially hiding her face. Perfect opportunity.

“Hey,” Ezra said in a smooth voice, or what he hoped was a smooth voice, anyways; it wasn’t like he had tons of experience with this kind of thing. “Whatcha doin’?”

Sabine did not look up at him. Instead, her shoulders tensed, and her hand clenched on the pencil she was holding. After a little while (Ezra wasn’t sure how long; he stopped counting after thirty), she said, simply, “Sketching.”

Sketching, huh? Okay, he could work with that. Just gotta keep it up with the smooth voice. “Oh, _sketching_? Sooo, what do you draw when you sketch?”

Sabine’s brow furrowed, and there was another long pause before she answered him. “Landscapes, mostly."

“Just landscapes? No people?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and muttered something that sounded an awful lot like “Do we really have to do this again?” In a more normal voice, Sabine told him, “Not right now.”

“Okay, but ‘not right now’ doesn’t mean you never have, right?”

“………I guess?”

Ezra frowned as he tried to think of something he could say, something that would keep the conversation tied to sketching, and yet still be smooth. It would help, it would definitely help, if he actually knew that much about sketching. As it stood, Ezra’s formal education had ended the night his parents… went away, and what education he’d had since then was, asides from what Kanan was teaching him about the Force, completely self-taught. They hadn’t gotten to art yet when he was still attending school. Ezra wouldn’t be too shocked if you told him the public schools in Capital City just didn’t bother teaching students about art, ever. That kind of crappy, half-assed effort was about what Ezra expected from anything related to the public infrastructure of Lothal. Especially considering how long it was taking them to fix the non-functioning parts of the sewers that he’d used to dodge Imperial patrols for how many years now?

Maybe maintenance on public infrastructure being crappy beyond belief wasn’t all bad, after all.

Never mind the shoddy state of public infrastructure on Lothal, though. Ezra needed something about _sketching_ , and in the scant seconds between Sabine’s ‘I guess’ and his reply, he wracked his brains for anything he knew about sketching. Anything that could be smooth.

A half-buried memory of watching a film Old Jho put on at his bar once guided Ezra as he forged ahead. “So, have you ever done sketching like that one vid?” What had been the name of that film? He’d left the bar in the middle of the film for reasons he couldn’t quite remember, though a few errant _noises_ he half-consciously associated with the film were starting to resurface in his mind. It had been pretty late at night when Old Jho put it on; maybe he’d just been tired. (But somehow, he didn’t think that was it.) “Like that one vid with, umm, I think he was called Steele Brightstar?” More of those noises were coming back to him, and Ezra felt a twinge of unease, but he kept on, “Yeah, that was the guy. He was—what?”

Sabine had finally looked up from her sketchbook, and the look on her face… was less than encouraging. For starters.

“ _Steele Brightstar_?” There was a quality to her voice like she didn’t know whether to screech or to laugh. “You mean Steele Brightstar the _porn star_?!”

Oh, _fuck_.

The only thing to do now was to enter immediate damage control, though as sweat began to bead on Ezra’s forehead, he became less and less certain that damage control was even a thing that existed in the galaxy. Ezra had the kind of luck that let him escape life-threatening situations with hardly a scratch, but he didn’t have the kind of luck that let him bow out gracefully from a _serious_ social fuck-up.

The explanation was meant to be coherent. Articulate, even. It was meant to be something that could be quickly deployed, like air-dropping an EMP device over a battlefield to deactivate any droids or electronic bombs before running like hell away.

“Iuhhhhebbehohis _that_ whothatguyisi’msorryi’msorry _please_ don’tkillme—”

It would have been better if the earth had yawned open under his feet and swallowed him up, just to get it over with. Or if he just spontaneously combusted; his face sure felt hot enough for that to be a possibility. What didn’t help was when Sabine did something Ezra had _never_ seen or heard her do before, and burst into loud, hysterical laughter.

So the whole situation had devolved into this: Ezra squirming in the hallway, his face practically on fire and his stomach doing backflips like he was gonna be sick at any moment, and Sabine sitting in her doorway doubled over with laughter. Yeah, Ezra would definitely like the universe to just fold in on itself and kill him now. It would have been quicker than what was almost certainly gonna happen once Sabine _stopped_ laughing.

Sabine got to her feet, still laughing. She had been laughing so hard that tears were glittering at the corners of her eyes, and there were patches of color in her cheeks that Ezra might have thought were pretty, if he wasn’t currently in mortal terror for his life.

“What’s going on?”

And the sound of Hera showing up from the _Phantom_ to see what the racket was all about did not make Ezra any more confident about his chances of getting out of this thing in one piece.

He was at least spared the burden of having to explain himself to Hera by Sabine swallowing down her laughter to say, in a still decidedly unsteady voice, “Nothing, Hera. Just the kid shooting his mouth off. Again.”

Now was as good a time to flee as any other, and if Ezra knew anything, he knew when he needed to take advantage of an opening. He saw his opening. He fled.

Behind him, he heard Hera saying, her voice light with a bit of seriousness tinting the edges, “Uhh, should I be concerned?”

Ezra didn’t stick around long enough to listen to Sabine’s response. He just found a nice, safe air vent to hunker down in until Sabine wasn’t angry anymore or the sun exploded and swallowed the ship whole. Whichever came first.

-0-0-0-

Okay, so Ezra Bridger didn’t know much about flirting. You could hardly blame him, considering all the other things that had been more important to him over the past several years, finding somewhere dry and relatively warm to sleep and finding food enough to keep from starving chief among them. Ezra Bridger didn’t know that much about flirting, but he knew a few things about what constituted the limits of good taste. And accidentally referencing a porn star when he was just trying to flirt was so far outside the limits of good taste it wasn’t even in the same galaxy as it. He was _not_ coming back from this one, not for a long time at least, and he’d be lucky if Sabine ever spoke to him outside of missions again. Maybe she wouldn’t even speak to him _during_ the missions—he’d seen her signal the others with hand signals before, and might just switch to doing that with him full-time. And then he’d have to explain to the others _why_ Sabine wasn’t talking to him anymore, and she had been here longer than him, after all, and…

He was spiraling a bit. He was doing that a lot more often than usual, and he wasn’t entirely sure why. He was spiraling, and there was nothing Ezra could actively do to stop it—he’d tried before, and that never worked. It would stop on its own eventually, though the upside-down feeling that accompanied it would take several hours more to dissipate.

Spiraling in an air vent was, well, the air vent was not the best place to spiral. His breathing got harsh and ragged, sometimes, and the sound tended to carry through the whole ship if he was loud enough and huddled in the wrong part of the vents. Kanan and Zeb were still out wherever it was they’d gone today, and Ezra thought he could sneak back to his cabin if he was quiet enough. Sabine did get pretty wrapped up in her work, after all. He’d been able to walk up behind her while she was working loads of times without her noticing until he’d started talking.

Ezra was about halfway to his cabin when any hope of heading in there to hide was dashed against the floor, never to get up again.

“Hey, kid? You got a minute?”

Ezra took a long, deep breath before turning to face her. She didn’t _sound_ angry—at least, she didn’t sound like she was on the verge of punching him in the face. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything beyond the idea that maybe Sabine was better than he was at hiding when she was angry.

Oh, well, better get it over with. Ezra turned around, and the words were pouring out of his mouth before he could stop them: “OkaylookI’msorryIswearIdidn’tknowthatguywasapornstarIdidn’tmean—“

“Okay, okay!” Sabine half-snapped, waving a hand to quiet him. “I want to _talk_ with you, not cave your teeth in.” Somehow, Ezra suspected the conversation could wind up taking a turn like that, if he wasn’t careful; the thing with the porn star had been way, _way_ beyond the limits of good taste. “Just follow me.”

And Ezra did follow her, saying nothing until he realized where she was leading him. “The gangplank?” he asked skeptically.

Sabine just shrugged. “Why not? That’s where every other important conversation on this ship seems to take place.”

Sure. He’d feel less constrained outside, and while he wasn’t sure things would go _that_ far, at least being outside would afford plenty of opportunities to run away.

Wind made the miles-long fields of grass all around the _Ghost_ sway gently as Ezra and Sabine sat down on the gangplank. It might have been picturesque, but the grass was of decidedly uneven lengths and looked like hair on the scalp of a balding man more than it looked like anything else—no vitality to it at all. Ezra looked over at Sabine decidedly gingerly. She still didn’t look properly angry, but he’d be lying if he said she looked particularly happy. Probably better to let her start the conversation.

And it was a long time before Sabine did start the conversation. Her mouth twisted, brow furrowing as if she was trying to decide on what to say. Finally, she sighed and asked, “Okay, how old are you again?”

“Uhh, fourteen?”

Sabine’s lips thinned. “Okay. Unless you were literally raised by lothwolves, I think you’re old enough to know better, but let’s just… _Fine_ , let’s just talk about this.” She turned at her waist to face him, frowning down. “Kid, for the _last time_ , I am not interested in you.”

Well, that did sound pretty final. But just to be sure (and the part of Ezra that knew when he needed to stop pushing his luck was screaming at him not to do this, but he really did need to be sure), “Really?”

“Yes, really!” And she really was nearly shouting this time.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“Because the glaring, the eye-rolling, and the refusal to flirt back didn’t make it crystal-clear that I wasn’t interested in you?” Sabine groaned and drummed her fingers on the gangplank. “Because while I may not have been raised in a culture that tells women they need to shut up and let men they don’t want flirting at them flirt at them to be ‘polite,’ I’ve spent the last few years in parts of the galaxy that believes that a _lot_.” She shrugged uncomfortably. “And Hera and Kanan wouldn’t tell you to back off—Kanan wasn’t taking it seriously, and I’m not sure Hera noticed—and I wasn’t sure how they’d react if I started yelling at you.”

Suddenly, Ezra felt more like he was going to be sick than he thought he’d ever been in his life. _That’s not what I meant_ , but all that came out was a barely audible “Oh.”

As if she hadn’t even heard him, Sabine went on, voice a little shaky, “Like, I _think_ it would have been okay. I think?” She looked at him meaningfully. “But you’re not the only one who feels like they’re walking on eggshells around the crew sometimes.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“You said that already. So.” Sabine poked Ezra on the shoulder. “Just to make sure everything is _crystal_ clear: Not interested in you. I’m not interested in _guys_ ; I’m sure as hell not interested in you.”

Well, something had been dashed, though it turned out to be Ezra’s hopes and not his life. You’ve always got to look on the positive side of things, and Ezra supposed that if Sabine was still willing to speak to him at all after all this, there were some positives that could come from this supremely awkward conversation. “Okay, so by ‘not interested in guys,’ you mean ‘interested in girls?’”

“Yes.”

“Okay, just checking, because ‘not interested in guys’ could have meant ‘not interested in anybody,’ and I think I’ve already filled up my jackass quota for the day; I don’t wanna check under the lid to see how much I’ve got left.” Yeah, Ezra had already managed to dodge one blaster bolt and come out of it only lightly singed. He had no interest in dancing in front of the barrel of the blaster again. He didn’t feel like trying his luck that far.

Sabine leaned back, letting her weight fall on her arms. “I like girls, kid. Just girls, although…” She frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know, you can’t really tell if someone’s nonbinary at first glance. I also haven’t had a lot of experience with species who don’t have the same gender constructs as humans and Twi’leks and… I don’t actually know anything about gender constructs among the Lasat; I’ve never been sure how Zeb would react if I asked him. And all that tends to vary between planets and cultures. I don’t like guys. I definitely don’t like guys.”

“Well, there are some pretty girls around Capital City.” Ezra smiled nervously. “If you want me to introduce you…”

A strange, hoarse sound like a choked-off laugh escaped Sabine’s mouth. “……Are you… are you volunteering to be my wingman or something?”

“……Maayyybbee?”

She did laugh this time, a short, sharp bark of a laugh that rang in the air before dying abruptly. “Thanks, but no thanks. If you do wingman like you do flirting, I feel like the only way you could be my wingman is to serve as someone for me to look better than by comparison. We—“ she became more serious “—are like a family on this ship, which makes you and me the kids. Brothers and sisters being each other’s wingmen is _weird_ , kid.”

“I… guess?” But this time, he didn’t find any sadness or frustration in him, not even a slight twinge. ‘We’re like a family.’ She’d said it before, but considering the circumstances, Ezra hadn’t exactly taken it to heart. But maybe being part of a new family would be nice. Having a sister could be cool.

They sat in silence for a little while, neither willing to talk or to get up and head back inside. The atmosphere had turned almost pleasant, and Ezra didn’t want to be the one to spoil it. He didn’t want to be the one to spoil a lot of things.

Then…

“ _Steele Brightstar? Really?!_ ”

“I didn’t know!”

“Where have you even _heard_ of Steele Brightstar?”

“Well, where have _you_ heard of Steele Brightstar?”

“We have smuggled a lot of shit in this ship since I joined up—“ Sabine made a face “—and as it happens, one of those shipments was a few crates of porn vids. Which we didn’t know where porn vids until we watched one of them to figure out what we were smuggling. Hera was _pissed_ , Kanan made a lot of commentary that makes me really wonder about what he did for work before Hera picked him up, and Zeb just kept talking about how weird human anatomy is. Chopper kept complaining about the lighting for some reason. And you didn’t answer my question: where have _you_ heard of Steele Brightstar?” She raised an eyebrow expectantly.

At least he had someone to pass the… whatever it was (blame or whatever) off onto this time, and quickly. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. Old Jho had one of Brightstar’s films playing in his bar one time when I went there?”

“ _What_?” Sabine all but shrieked. “Oh, that is _gross_! And the bar’s a public space, too; doesn’t that violate public decency laws or something?”

“The people who kidnap people to make them work in forced labor camps care about _public decency_? That’s… _weird_.”

“They usually have pretty weird priorities, but good point. But Old Jho played a _porn_ vid in his bar? _Seriously_??”

Ezra laughed, partly due to her reaction, partly due to the surfacing memory of his own disbelief and disgust. “Yeah, _seriously_. It was really gross, and this is coming from someone who’s had to go digging through dumpsters to get food a _lot_. People like that stuff?”

“Not anyone with good taste.”

“We have good taste?”

" _Aagghh_."

Yeah, having an older sister sounded kinda cool.


End file.
